Question to the Attorney General:

To ask the Attorney General, how many prosecutions for offences against children have there been for Human Trafficking under the Modern Slavery Act 2015 in each year since its enactment.

The Crown Prosecution Service (‘CPS’) maintains a central record of the number of offences in which a prosecution commenced, including offences charged by way of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. This data may be further disaggregated by the child abuse case monitoring flag. The CPS definition of child abuse covers any case where the victim was under 18 years of age at the time of the offence and includes allegations or crimes perpetrated by both adults and under 18s.

Section 1 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 provides an offence of slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour; Section 2 provides for a single offence of human trafficking covering sexual and non-sexual exploitation; and, Section 4 provides that it is an offence to commit another offence with a view to committing a trafficking offence under Section 2.

Since the Act came into force and up to the end of March 2020, the number of Modern Slavery Act offences flagged as child abuse is as follows:

This data does not indicate the number of individual defendants prosecuted for these offences or the final outcome of the charged offence.

It is not possible to separately report the nature of, or type of exploitation carried out on victims of modern slavery or trafficking offences other than by manually examining case files at disproportionate cost.